Post-holiday greetings! I hope youâ€™re in a pleasant haze filled with too much food (and family). I wanted to take a post to highlight a handful of the awesome, independent games that came out earlier this year. Theyâ€™re all very interesting in their own rights, but they all feature interesting mechanics or storiesâ€”things I considered outstanding, specifically in relation to some of their larger peers: the Call of Duties of the world. Most of them are also perfect for new gamers, or introductions into gaming, as most eschew the traditional difficulties or reflexes associated with the medium.

Gone Home
Youâ€™ll find Gone Home on nearly every â€œbest ofâ€ list this year, and for good reason. Though I wrote about it earlier from a perspective of player/protagonist relationships, the game also shines for storytelling, sexual-identity exploration, and a 90â€™s Riot grrrl soundtrack. Trips around an empty house will find homemade cassette tapes, childhood drawings, and evidence of hidden and open family dramas. Itâ€™s an eye-opening exploration of whatâ€™s possible in a young medium, and well worth the praise itâ€™s receiving.

Papers, Please
Papers, Please combines the retro visual-style of the original Nintendo with the social and political themes of a crumbling Eastern-European society. Self-described as a â€œdystopian document thriller,â€ Papers Please welcomes the player as a worker who has drawn the job of immigration inspector. By day, you process the documents of hopeful immigrants, poring over their passports, visas, and vitals to determine if they are allowed through. Stamping no can be heartbreaking; sometimes stamping yes can be, too. Part of the game is managing a desk full of reference materials, shuffling pictures, maps, text, and speed all at the same time. When you dive in, what surfaces are political plots, corruption, and a nightly mini-game where you must decide how to use your small funds to comfort your family: with medicine, food, or heat. Bleak house.

The Stanley Parable
While Gone Home was a first-person exploration of home life, The Stanley Parable is, at first, a first-person exploration of an empty office building. Today is different than yesterday, but itâ€™s not clear why; it isâ€”and isnâ€™tâ€”your job to figure out why. As you explore, the game unfolds easily into rumination on jobs, life, destiny, and games, all narrated by a velvety British voice that describes your every move. Follow his instructions, or set out on your own; the branching paths are many, and the outcomes satisfyingly differentâ€”or similar.

AntichamberAntichamber is similar to so many war-like shooters in that one of its focal points is a gun. Antichamberâ€™s gun, however, is one of creation, not destruction. Players must navigate a mostly-white world that features devious, mind-bending puzzles filled with impossible spaces, rooms, turns, and other spatial discrepancies that seem to occur when backs are turned. Learning to explore and navigate the illogical space is both nightmarish and Zen-like. At times, you feel trapped or hopeless; at others, filled with countless Eureka moments or realizations. Either way, it feels like a world to which Bill and Ted might have accidentally taken an unprepared Euclid in the middle of a proof. He wonâ€™t need that geometry here, anyway.

Proteus
When my mom visited town at the beginning of the month, I got her to sit down and play her first (ever) video game. It was Proteus, and even she enjoyed it. I previously wrote about the gameâ€™s exceptional relationship with the player, but truth be told, it excels for so many other reasons. She liked encountering the stone circles, a favorite formation of hers, but others would find it comforting for its soft sounds and soft edges that roll through different seasons on what feels like commentary on life, death, and existence. Proteus is filled with hidden machinations and the feeling that thereâ€™s something deeper below the surface. But at the end, the game itself is beautiful, even at its surface, and offers up something that is well worth the visit.

Starseed PilgrimStarseed Pilgrim would be a terrible dinner guest, mostly because it doesnâ€™t bring a whole lot to the table. A brief mention of seeds and youâ€™re on your way to discovering the intricate methods (and madness) of its intrinsic system. While Starseed Pilgrim would be easy to dismiss as shallow, the truth is anything but. Players who persevere will discover a challenging yet fair world that they will literally build, planting different seeds that create different sections. Most game reviews refuse to discuss games in-depth because of plot spoilers; Starseed Pilgrim reviewers were afraid of spoiling mechanics. Theyâ€™re definitely worth the wait.

Singapore based artist Robert Zhao Renhui is theÂ Institute of Critical Zoologists, an organization that â€” for any Doctor Who fans out there â€” would be the environmental analogue to the Torchwood Institute. Â The fictional Torchwood was founded to protect the Earth from supernatural and extraterrestrial threats; with that mandate in hand its employees must remain open and unperturbed by a myriad of strange and uncanny possibilities within the universe. Shrouded in secrecy, however, it attempts to perpetuate the myth of everyday banality, to keep their fellow human citizens free from fear. Although similarly invested in strange zoological proclivities of our non-human fellows, the ICZ is not a secret society. It delves into the multifarious world around us to expose the strange assumptions Â humanity takes for granted about its surrounding landscape. Working primarily as a photographer, Renhui blends fact and fiction to emphasize the idiosyncratic relations between animals, their habitats, and the humans that categorize them. While the result is ecologically minded, Â the dominant effect is uncanny. The ICZ affectively unearths little understood behavioral habits of animals and re-presents them within gallery settings as representational photography, encyclopedic texts, and multimedia installations. Currently ICZ currently has an exhibit,Â The Last Thing You See,Â up atÂ 2902 GalleryÂ in Singapore until January 5th that examines the act of sight. By demonstrating the shift in perception that would result from a sensitivity to ultraviolet light, ICZ reveals a world familiar to insects while being totally divorced from human experience. ICZ is going to appear in an upcoming series of shows I’m curating atÂ Gallery 400Â andÂ La Box.

“A spider web which is a flower,” Institute of Critical Zoologists, 2013,Â 150cm x 100cm, DiasecFrom the series, How to eat bees?Under ultraviolet light, certain parts of a spider web glow, forming a a pattern that looks like a flower – this is visible to bees, which attracts them.

Caroline Picard:Â How did the Institute of Critical Zoologists (ICZ) come about and what does “animal spectatorship” mean?

RobertÂ ZhaoÂ Renhui:Â The ICZ came about mainly because of my interest with photography and animals.Â A long time ago, I was involved with animal rights activism. At that point of time,Â I was curious with how photography was used in animal activism.Â I contributed a lot of photographs to talk about the plight of animals living in captivity in Asia. I got too emotional and personally involved at one point. On the other hand, I was also using photographs to create my own fictional narratives about humans and animals. In college, my tutor asked me to look at my photographic narratives with my concerns of animals rights together, instead of two separate projects. Slowly, the ICZ took shape. Animal spectatorship, in my work, is very much about the conditions of looking and understanding animals.

CP:Â I feel like you’re interested in the way things are visible and invisible â€” for instance how a human can all but disappear in a suit of leaves, or what a spider’s web looks like in ultraviolet light, can you talk more about how this series of works came together.

RZR:Â My interests are very much shaped by my medium, photography. Photography has always been about a way of seeing. In this exhibition, I was interested in how not seeing is as important as seeing.Â For the longest time, nobody knew why certain spiders weave distinctive markings on their webs. It isnâ€™t logical for spiders to make these markings because then they render an otherwise hard-to-see web visible. Scientists came up with a theory that the markings are made to warn larger animals to not walk into the spider web and destroy it. In other words, the insect trap had a defense mechanism. Â It was not only recently that we realised that most insects see in the UV spectrum, a visual spectrum invisible to humans. Under UV light, the web mimics the shape of a flower. These markings are also visible on flowers in UV light. A spider web that wants to be a flower. I like that idea. A mimic and an invisible trap. Like a photograph.

Institute of Critical Zoologists, “Eskimo wolf trap often quoted in sermons,” 2013, Dimensions variable,Â Installation of diasec, eskimo knife, polyurethane, 200 kg of sodium bicarbonate. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Eventually, a wolf will approach the knife and begin to cautiously sniff and lick the frozen blood. After believing it is safe, the wolf will lick more aggressively. Soon, the blade of the knife becomes exposed and it begins to nick the wolfâ€™s tongue. Because its tongue has been numbed by the cold of the frozen blood, the wolf is unaware that he is being cut, and the blood it now tastes is its own. Excited at the prospect of fresh, warm blood, the wolf will hungrily lick the blade all the more. In a short time, the wolf will grow dizzy and disoriented. In a matter of hours, it will die from blood loss, literally drinking itself to death. As horrible as this picture is, it illustrates an important truth.

CP: Traps come up in several of your worksÂ â€” Â I’m thinking of your bee trap for instance, or the wolf trap â€” in both instances I feel like you’re somehow able to tap into an animal semiotics, almost, using the bee’s attraction to blue to bring them into the gallery, or using the wolf’s appetite for blood to disguise its sense of pain. What draws you to traps?Â

RZR:Â Michel Foucault said that â€œvisibility is a trap.â€ He meant it in the case of the Panopticon, a prison where the all the inmates were visible to one another, hence creating a system of totalitarian, mutual surveillance. Iâ€™ve been thinking a lot about this statement, but with the trap not relating to the observed, but the observer. Visibility is a trap because we imagine we know a lot through empirical evidence. But what is beyond the visible? Even my interest with animal traps is linked to my interest with photography. A photograph can trap us rather than liberate us. Seeing can be dangerous and misleading because we always have an eye out for the truth. It narrows our vision and the price to pay is not really knowing the bigger picture. That’s how animals get trapped â€“ Â they fail to see beyond what is already presented to them.

Institute of Critical Zoologists, “World Goldfish Queen,” 2013, from the series A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World,

CP:Â You have a book that just came out! How long did it take for you to make it? What does it contain?

RZR:Â A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World is an encyclopedia of man-made nature. It started of with the goldfish. Why doesn’t the goldfish have a scientific name? Why is it not included in any natural history encyclopedia? Today, the goldfish is a very common fish and in China, they recently held a competition for the World Goldfish Queen. I wanted to find out if there was a book that the goldfish can exist in other than a decorative aquarium trade fish. I started looking at other aquarium fishes that were artificial and slowly branched out into other animals and plants affected by aesthetic modification, ecological conservation, pollution, evolution and genetic-modification. It took me about a year to create the volume. Included in the book are my past projects like Acusis and A heartwarming feeling. So you can say the book has almost 3 years of my research. At the end of the book (there are about 3 books in this book, all housed in a box) there is a book that talks about Tropical Bonsai, specifically the Banana Bonsai Plant. My father keeps a dwarfed banana bonsai plant of 6 years at 15cm tall. Bonsai is the art of miniaturising trees. It is man controlling nature in a very obvious and aesthetic way. There are rules to create bonsai and there are also rules to view bonsai. There are front views, side views and back views. This is a very important part of the book. Â It offers a way to think about the way we have controlled nature. As a species, we have always defined and controlled the way nature existed with us and this is nothing new. Brocolli and Cauliflower are not natural although we have become so familiar with them. Man has always determined what nature should look and feel like. The way we think and look at Bonsai may offer us a way to contemplate our complicated existence with nature.

This past semester I taught an undergraduate class at Emory University titled â€œVisual Studies: The Image.â€ Some of the questions the course focused on were: what is an image? what does it mean to make an image? how should we look at images? what do these images do to the way we think about the world? In a world saturated with images, I thought it important to encourage students to consider the long and complicated history of the image.

Just a few broad strokes to contextualize, a brief, abridged, and very limited history, a few mile markers:

5th century BC: Zeuxis and Parhassius engage in a painting contest. Zeuxis painted a scene of grapes. Birds, attempting to feed on them, flew into and pecked at the painting. Next up was Parhassius. Zeuxis demanded to see the painting that was hidden behind a curtain, but Parhassius revealed that the painting was in fact the curtain. Â Parhassius wins: his painting of a curtain fooled Zeuxis, a fellow artist, while Zeuxisâ€™ painting of grapes only fooled the birds. [1]

Platoâ€™s Allegory of the Cave in Book XII of his Republic tells a story of prisoners who are trapped in a cave and have only known a play of shadows on the cave wall, created by puppets backlit by the cave fire. These shadows are their only reality. In the event that one of the prisoners leaves the cave, his eyes, blinded by the sunâ€™s light, canâ€™t deal with actual reality. He chooses to go back to the cave unless he is encouraged to remain outside of its depths. However, in Plato’sÂ Timaeus, the origins of the cosmos is attributed to its being the image of the eternal paradigm; this is a materialization that is divine. [2]

Sacred texts of the Abrahamic religions describe the function of the image. We find that man is made in God’s image, but we should not worship false images, idols.Â Fast forward to 8th and 9th century Byzantium and the clashes over the status of the icon; a debate that finds its roots in Greek philosophy along with Christian theology. The image is either sacred, or it is false and should be destroyed. [3]

Then, consider the birth of photography in the 19th century and the rise of cinematic propaganda. Now, reality television, Instagram, and the space program. Or, â€œCharlie Rules the Worldâ€: Episode 8, Season 8 of Itâ€™s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – the Gang gets sucked into an online game and their distinctions between reality and fantasy, actuality and virtuality, blur.

Outer Space and the Domestic Television

Atlanta-based artist P. Seth Thompsonâ€™s show The Last One, which closes on December 30, 2013at {Poem 88} in Atlantaâ€™s West Midtown neighborhood, presents the viewer with the artistâ€™s confrontations between reality and image, truth and fiction. Using science fiction as the portal, Thompson shows us the strange and close encounters we have with the images that in/form us.

The center piece of the show, the video An Event Cannot Have An End Time in the Past, is an exercise in memory, news media, scientific teleology, and disaster. Made using primarily the artistâ€™s childhood home movies, the videoâ€™s layers reveal a space-scape that fill in the contours of the family’s bodies on screen. In an abrupt ending, we witness the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion; its footage become home movie, entering the family’s domestic space on a screen that serves as the centerpiece for a living room. The sound, composed by Jon Ciliberto, takes the viewer on an ambient journey up to a transformative climax. As I finish this article, the TV program â€œHow the Universe Worksâ€ on the Science Channel plays in the background at my friendâ€™s motherâ€™s home. I am here for Christmas. The lights of the Christmas tree bounce off the digitally rendered stardust and animated theaters of comet crashes, planetary orbits, and blackhole consumption. The TV viewer is informed of the Earthâ€™s pending catastrophe; the Earth occupies a precarious position in the universe that is always on the precipice of doom.

P. Seth Thompson. “An Event Cannot Have an End Time in the Past.” 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

Thompsonâ€™s statement accompanying the show claims that he is â€œco-opt[ing] and challeng[ing] the images to underscore our complicity in the suspension of belief in the digital era.â€ [4]Â What is the â€œchallengeâ€ he is posing to images? What does the rhetoric of challenge mean in the context of the Challengerâ€™s explosion? What has our fascination with images of space done for our understanding of our position in the world? The American space program, more rigorously tended to after the launch of the Sovietâ€™s Sputnik, serves as an entryway into the ways in which images – both physical and mental – inform policy and American everyday life. In America’s determination to win the space race during the Cold War, where two major nations became images of themselves, what gets covered over? How do these images of space and nation converge to influence everyday realities?

Thompsonâ€™s addition of his photograph Niels Bohr Through the Looking Glass, points further to American policy and its way of navigating science. Bohr, a Danish physicist who received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the research on the structure of atoms and quantum mechanics, was also involved with the Manhattan Project, the project that developed the atomic bomb during the Second World War. Not only is Bohr an interesting figure to include here, an important scientist and public presence, but it is also his theories of light – that is, the discovery that light behaves as both a particle and a wave – that are important to the show. Light, the essential factor in the production of photographs, is itself unstable.

Descartesâ€™ project, which was an attempt to discover the truly certain, rejected sensory experience because of its capability to deceive; the only certainty we have exists in the mind. This rejection of the corporeal led him, in his Meditations on First Philosophy, to reject physics (important to the premise of this particular exhibition), since it is a science based on corporeal nature; he turned instead to geometry. [7] Descartesâ€™ dismissal of the body and the sensorial serves as the starting point for its own deconstruction in the project of phenomenology. For Edmund Husserl, the appearance is all we have and we must bracket out any notions of an underlying reality of the object. These appearances, taken as phenomenon, are images experienced in perception. They are both there for me as existing in my perception, but they also transcend my perception and are apart from me. These images can’t merely exist in my head; they have to have their own sort of actuality. [8]

Disintegrating Images

As Iâ€™ve mentioned above and in a previous article, [9]Â the image has been historically regarded as a dangerous falsity. It is not only not truth, but it is a danger to truth itself; it is only a shadow on the wall. Chris Markerâ€™s short film that uses text from Platoâ€™s Allegory of the Cave shows the potential danger of our fascination with cinema, a stance that Walter Benjamin writes of in his 1936 essay â€œThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.â€ [10]Â Benjamin describes the way in which the film actor, in acting for the camera, uses â€œhis whole living person, yet forgo[es] his auraâ€ (229). This â€œself-alienationâ€ opens the door for Fascism to render politics as an aesthetics (242).

Thompsonâ€™s layering and pixelation of the cinematic image exhibits a gesture of disintegration, not necessarily incorporation. What is the image disintegrating/dissolving into? Our collective imaginary? His photograph The Spacemanâ€™s Disappearing Act, presents the viewer with an almost illegible image when viewed up close. However, when viewed from the side, the image reveals a person clad in a spacesuit. It is only from an oblique view that the spaceman reveals himself. In the Lacanian sense of anamorphosis, the viewer gazes upon the distorted image which conceals the Real and thus recognizes herself as the annihilated subject; she can’t be the privileged center. [11] She becomes aware of how she is seeing and therefore aware that she can be seen from such an angle. She is an image that can be perceived.

Outer Space, as the final frontier, serves as an extreme example of our fantasies. However, more â€œmundaneâ€ images fill in our memories and bodies. As I wrote about in a previous article, [12]Â Jill Frankâ€™s photographs, comprising her series Romance, approach similar issues Thompson addresses, of the ways in which cinema inhabits our everyday lives. However, what we find in Frankâ€™s work is the bodily mimicry of the viewed. The cinematic image, not registered itself on film, is instead registered through the bodies of the photographed subjects. The image has been acted out, performed, incorporated into everyday bodies.

The Last One offers actual and virtual disaster with sentimentality. Thompson references the heroâ€™s journey, a theory proposed by Joseph Campbell that organizes quintessential heroic journey stories into a definitive structure. The structure, formulated for the traveling male, is a formalization of the relationship between constructed narrative, everyday life, and mythology. This constructed narrative enables the space program and therefore constituted the situation in which the Challenger catastrophe, witnessed through the media, could occur. What happens when disaster is sentimentalized in the domestic sphere? The images inÂ The Last One mayÂ occupy an oppositional pole to Warhol’s works on disaster, car crashes, and American violence. Warhol shows the viewer news media coverage of American disasters without sentimentality. They are cold and alienating. In a sense, Thompson’s works invite the viewer to engage with them in a way that bring her into the narrative fold. However, the danger here is that she can get too comfortable. The question becomes: in our everyday lives lived in the midst of disaster and violence, how do we navigate these images surrounding us in a way that simultaneously connects to and disengages from them?

Since the mid-1960â€™s Linda Mary Montano has been steadily eroding the boundary between art and life through her pioneering work in performance, video and sculpture. From dealing with personal trauma, performing multiple identities, durational projects, feminist issues, and coming to grips with spiritual life, Montanoâ€™s influential work often involves aspects of ritual, humor, and healing properties. In 2013, Montano had a concentrated survey at SITE Santa Fe, Linda Mary Montano:Always Creative, in which she exhibited over forty years of work, including: Mitchellâ€™s Death (1977), Fourteen Years of Living Art (1984-98), and a new, two-part performance, Singing My Heart Outâ€¦Singing My Heart In for which she sang seven straight hours at both the opening and closing of the exhibition.

For your Christmas-day reading pleasure, Montano graciously lays out her thoughts on the holiday season, anxieties about aging, and bringing her work in video to an end.

Can you start us with a Christmas blessing?

We are bliss eternally. If we feel it, we experience joy; if we experience joy we experience ecstasy; if we experience ecstasy the next step is union.Â May we all beÂ happy in the way we need and be kind to ourselves also.

Were you good this year?

I was able toÂ travel into the dark this yearÂ and that’s a good thing.Â I made three tapes that plunged into the depths.Â My infancy:Â Mom Art (on my fear of learning too much about my childhood),Â Nurse!, Nurse!,Â (on my fear of “catching”Â dementia)Â and My Pope Dream: (onÂ my need to reform the Catholic Church).

Art is so kind. She lets us be afraid aesthetically!

All videos will be on YouTube in January 2014.

It was so good to look atÂ the dark but scary to see myself being so transgressive. IÂ shocked myself this year. The little girl is now in cahoots with an older Linda.

My next-to-almost-last video will beÂ Death in the Art/Life of Linda Mary Montano, 2014.

It is from a text I wrote for a slide lecture in 1996 and opens all of the death doors which then was radical thing to do. Now that the elephant of death is in the room, it’s no big deal.

You have been living by the Art=Life philosophy for decades. Youâ€™ve also gone back to the Catholic faith after having not practiced it for many years. So, when the holidays roll around, do you have a particular way of performing/living the season?

I play the typical neurotic yes/no games many others play. Gift? Who to? What?Â The shoulda, coulda woulda games. I also think I should watchÂ A Christmas Carolevery year, and Iâ€™m glad when I do.

This year I am practicingÂ being anÂ infantÂ as a secret performance and this is helping me get into the atmosphere of no-mind, baby-mind, innocence.

Hotly debated topic: multi-color lights or white lights?

Inner lights. Let me share my Poland poem with you, so you know why. I was just there in November 2013 and “became light.”

Mom: “Linda, turn some lights off. This room is lit up like a Polish church!”â€¨Â â€¨

After:

Bulleted buildings:Â CHECK

Booted marching:Â Â CHECK

Anne Frank attics:Â Â CHECK

Death provoking winters:Â CHECK

Five keyed entrances:Â CHECK

Historical litanies:Â CHECK

Embodies memories:Â CHECK

Hourly cappuccinos:Â Â CHECK

Gilded angels:Â Â CHECK

Whispered nightmares: CHECK

High pitched smiles:Â CHECK

Bundled grief:Â CHECK

Now my room-heart is lit up like a Polish church.

Â Â

Recently you produced one of your last videos,Â Nurse! Nurse!, an incredibly moving work about aging, acceptance, caring and gratitude. Is this close to your personal situation?

At almost 72, the curtain between the world of being here and not being here gets thinner. While I’m stillÂ out of adult Depends,Â I decided to look atÂ my worst aging fears, as art, and I found it so refreshing to practice faux madness in this film. The prerogative of the artist, the vocation of the artist isÂ to go into the underworld and come back or not! I donâ€™t want to beÂ upset in case I have to be sentÂ toÂ the nursing home-penitentary of dementia or Alzheimerâ€™s. Iâ€™m practicing now to taste losing my mind via dementia. It is homeopathy. Cure like with like?Â Maybe. But the bottom line for me has always been, Repress not. And if things go in the direction of radical madness, at least I am familiar with howÂ loss of this present ego-danceÂ looks/feels/smells!

Meditation is another method designed to help lose the mind but videotaping meditation is not as much fun as videotaping myself resisting being diapered in a nursing home!!!!!!

Youâ€™re in a period of phasing out your video work. Why this deliberate move away from the medium?

I listen to my voices and I heard, “Linda, you are becoming a greedaholic, thinking “OhhhhhhhhhhhÂ I have to make a video aboutÂ _________ and one about————and another about___________.” The voices said, “Wow it will be so wonderful to makeÂ 82388449Â more videos.”

That scared me because this is not how I wantÂ to think.Â It’s the wall street of art mentality. More, bigger, better, another, higher, grander, winner, originator, first, brighter…the shopping listÂ of consuming inspiration is endless.